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Friday, July 29, 2016

KOT Won The Battle Against Koffi Olomide But Is Losing The War. Here's Why.

Last week’s
deportation of famed 60-year-old Congolese rumba star, Koffi Olomide, after he
was filmed apparently kicking a female member of his band at the Jomo Kenyatta
International Airport has once again highlighted both the power and limitations
of social media in Kenya.

A video of the
incident went viral on the internet precipitating a furious reaction from the
ever vocal Kenyans On Twitter (KOT) demanding action be taken against the singer.
His arrest and deportation the next day was hailed as an example of how the
collective voices of citizens can be harnesses through the internet to prompt
governing authorities to move.

This is, of course,
not unique to Kenya. Across the globe, activists have become adept at utilizing
the internet and social media to power movements for political and social
change. The so-called “Twitter revolutions” that swept through countries as
diverse as Moldova, Ukraine, Egypt, Tunisia and Iran demonstrated that the
ability of ordinary citizens to communicate and share ideas can have real
consequences. In fact, authoritarian governments have sought to restrict the
availability of such technologies fearing that a better-coordinated populace
would constrain their ability to act without oversight. A good example was the
shutting down of social media by the Uganda government during the elections in
March.

However, it is
instructive to note that most social media revolutionaries have ultimately
failed in delivering sustained political change. Across the Middle East, the dreams
fostered by the Arab Spring have given way to the nightmare of civil war and
state disintegration. In Turkey and in Egypt, authoritarian leaders were able
to reassert their power.

The fact is much
social media activism tends to focus on the visible and easily apprehended symbols
of oppression rather than its hidden and deeply ingrained roots. This is partly
because of the nature of the internet and social media. There is only so much
insight you can stuff in to 140 characters. And the glut of information and
causes demanding our attention mean that most can afford little more than a
cursory acquaintance with the issues. Stripped of nuance and context, much social
media activism attempts to reduce complex issues to pithy hashtags and to reproduce
the world in superficial dualities of black and white, good and evil. It is
thus not surprising that these utopian visions would disintegrated when exposed
to the full spectrum of reality. As Ivan Kratsev noted in the New York Times
last year, “you can tweet a revolution but you cannot tweet a government”.

The true value of
social media lies neither in its undoubted ability to mobilize large numbers of
people around a particular issue nor in its undeniable power to instrumentalize
their voices to achieve specific short term goals. The real power is in creating
a public sphere where conversations can happen. Just as the printing press
helped democratize Europe by providing space for discussion and agreement among
politically engaged citizens, so social media and the internet can foster
change in the long term by building online communities that articulate, echo,
challenge, shape and transform political ideas. As noted by Clay Shirky, Professor
of New Media at New York University, wrote in an essay for Foreign Affairs
magazine, “access to information is far less important,
politically, than access to conversation”.

The impact of social media in the case of
Koffi Olomide should thus not be judged solely by his deportation, the
cancellation of his concerts in Kenya and Zambia and his jailing in Congo, but by
how conversations and attitudes towards gender-based violence, and in
particular violence against women, are shaped in the coming days, weeks and months.

In 2013, online outrage at the rape and
attempted murder of a teenage girl in Busia by six men whom police “punished”
by ordering them to cut grass, led to the hunt, re-arrest, trial and subsequent
jailing of three of the perpetrators. Yet, beyond this “quick win” the system
that allowed the atrocity to happen remains unreformed and none of the officers
involved appear to have suffered any consequences. More to the point, KOT discussions
of this have vanished.